


two more months 'til I'm done with this

by rillrill



Category: Veep
Genre: Absent Parents, Backstory, Bisexuality, Bullying, Coming of Age, F/M, Gen, Less Angsty Than it Sounds, M/M, Private School, Sexual Coercion, Slurs, Speech and Debate, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-28 21:51:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6346735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>By the time Jonah is twelve years old, he’s nearly six feet tall.</i>
</p><p>Eighteen years in the New Hampshire suburbs would make anyone miserable. Jonah's no different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	two more months 'til I'm done with this

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate title: _Making a Mediocre White Man._
> 
> Heed the tags. This isn't necessarily angst-ridden woobie fic, but I've always been so fascinated by how all the shit Jonah gets thrown at him just seems to bounce off him in an almost pathetic way (up to and including repeated sexual assaults!), and am so interested in how that kind of temperament gets formed. So, y'know. One person's backstory, etc.
> 
> Title is from "My Last Semester" by the Wonder Years.

**ten**

 

“Honey,” says Pam Kane, “you shouldn’t get your hopes up.”

Jonah rolls his eyes and keeps kicking the soccer ball against the side of the house. The brick wall without any low windows, because of what happened last time. The grass is slick with early morning dew and water from the sprinkler, and he can already feel his socks starting to get a little wet, which is super annoying. His mom is watching him from the porch, her arms folded across her chest, her new wedding ring gleaming on her left hand and visible all the way from the side yard.

“He’s gonna show up,” Jonah says, aiming a hard kick at the house. His foot connects off-center and it flies sharply upward instead, hitting the ground only a few feet from where it started. “He wouldn’t just lie to me.”

Pam says nothing, just folds her arms a little tighter. Jonah hears the click of the storm door and then the heavy wooden front door shut behind her and keeps dribbling.

 

* * *

 

**twelve**

 

By the time Jonah is twelve years old, he’s nearly six feet tall. 5’11” on the first day of seventh grade, because his mother still insists on measuring him every year, even as he rolls his eyes and slouches through it.

Pam drives him to school every day, because Derryfield is conveniently situated about halfway between their house in Nashua and UNHM, where she works. Which is why he still has to go there, he’s pretty sure. It’s not like he couldn’t have gone to Trinity or St. Christopher. Lots of people go there who aren’t even Catholic. Actually, for high school, he really wants to transfer to Exeter. The Kanes are an Exeter legacy family. Uncle Jeff went to Exeter, and so did Uncle Theo and their father and their grandfather. And Pam keeps telling him maybe, _maybe_ , if he works hard and keeps his grades up, and it’s the only thing keeping him going at this point because he really hates Derryfield.

Hates the stupid khakis and red-and-white polo that make up the middle school uniform.

Hates the upper school students. Who are dicks. All of them.

Hates everyone in his grade, boys and girls alike, because they’ve all known each other since kindergarten and nobody ever forgets anything. He definitely doesn’t forget how Brady Lucas gave him an Indian burn in third grade or Spencer Haberman used to steal his lunch out of his cubbyhole in first. He likes the girls better than the boys, actually, because at least some of them are nice to his face. But not most of them. Really, he hates everyone but Bryce Kaufman. Who is okay. But barely.

Derryfield splits up into single-sex schools after eighth grade. So he has about two more years of people being sort of nice to his face before everything goes to shit.

So he really, really wants to go to Exeter instead.

“You should play basketball,” Coach Jensen says, looking him up and down the first day of seventh grade physical education.

Jonah lifts one shoulder, shrugs noncommittally. “I kind of like soccer better,” he says.

“Soccer’s for fags,” snickers someone in the back of the room, and he’s pretty sure it’s Brady but he doesn’t want to turn his head and give them the satisfaction of knowing he heard. The coach says nothing, just huffs through his mustache.

“I expect to see you at basketball tryouts,” he says, and Jonah nods because what else is he supposed to do.

(The thing is that he’s really, really bad at basketball. There’s a home movie somewhere of him getting hit in the face during a peewee game. Being taller doesn’t necessarily make you better, just makes you a target. And as much as Stepdad Brian tries to get him outside to practice, plays endless games of HORSE with him before going out for ice cream after, it doesn’t seem to take. And the thing that bothers him, if he has to get down to it — why basketball? Why has everyone decided that’s what he’ll be good for? Why not something he’s actually good at? Just because he’s bad at school doesn’t mean he’s automatically good at sports. He has no idea what he’s good at, but it’s not going to be basketball.)

 

* * *

 

  
**thirteen**

 

Laura Owens is the hottest girl in their grade. He’s pretty much decided on that.

The thing is that nobody else seems to agree. In November, Brady and Jason and Spencer put together a list ranking the eighth grade girls, and Laura is only number ten. _Number ten_. She’s got those dark eyes and she’s not too thin or too fat and when she smiles, it’s really more of a smirk, like she’s always thinking of something too mean to say out loud. She’s not mean, but she could be, and that’s what Jonah likes about her, the way she always seems to be balancing on some razor’s edge of ruthlessness and mercy.

The other guys don’t like her because she’s stuck up. That’s Brady’s line. “She’d be higher if she weren’t so fucking stuck up,” he laughs, but when Jonah asks what he means, casually, like he’s just playing devil’s advocate, Brady doesn’t seem to have a real answer. As far as Jonah can tell, “stuck up” as applied to Derryfield girls means “won’t let Brady Lucas touch their tits.” She’s hot, but she’s stuck up. She’s hot but she doesn’t smile enough. She’s hot but she acts like she’s smarter than everyone else.

“She gets it from hanging out with Cathy Edison,” Spencer says, and adds in a loud stage whisper, “ _Lesbos_.”

“That’s hot,” Jonah cracks, but they don’t laugh and he doesn’t bother keeping up the conversation.

 

Sebastien Baudelaire is amazing. He’s so _cool_ , easily the coolest guy in the upper school, and his coolness doesn’t seem affected. It seems to come so effortlessly to him, like he was just born with his settings calibrated to cool. Sebastien was born in Paris, and his dad is a GE trade executive, and he’s just so smart and funny and student body president and does morning announcements and is also the lead in the spring musical, which is Footloose.

He’s assigned to be Jonah’s upper school peer tutor for English and Jonah’s never hung on anyone’s words like he does with Sebastien. He’s never been so embarrassed about his grammar and spelling and atrocious handwriting as he is when Sebastien points out the words he’s misspelled or tells him to change around how a sentence is constructed. He feels awkward and out of sync with his own heartbeat, erases a hole in the paper in his haste, and tries not to stare as Sebastien leans over to pull a piece of looseleaf paper out of his own thick English lit binder.

Tries not to stare at the sliver of skin that’s revealed as Sebastien stands and yawns and stretches, his grey senior sweater riding up a little at the bottom. It’s weird that he feels kind of warm and sweaty. He doesn’t usually feel like this around… whatever.

They’re sitting in the library and Sebastien’s reading his English report on The Outsiders, and nodding along. “This is pretty good,” he says as he sets it down and picks up a red colored pencil. “I’m gonna mark a couple things I saw, but I think you could totally turn this in for an A if you fix the spelling and the grammar here.”

“Cool,” Jonah says. “I was really… I liked the book.”

“Yeah, me too,” Sebastien says as he underlines a sentence in the first paragraph. “So how did your oral report go? You told me you were looking forward to that.”

Jonah shrugs. “I think it went okay. Everybody laughed a lot. Mrs. Cooper says I’m a good speaker, so…”

Sebastien smiles slightly, crookedly, and his dark eyes flick up from the paper to meet Jonah’s. “You should think about joining speech and debate next year,” he says. “Mr. Wallace would love you. He likes big talkers.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Jonah says. Sebastien’s nose is covered in light freckles and his hair looks so soft and he has no idea why he’s noticing these things or why his heart is beating so fast. It might be the lighting. He’s probably just wired from the Red Bull he drank at lunch.

 

He asks Laura Owens on a date.

He has no idea why, or what comes over him. Actually, it’s not really a date. It’s a group date. A double “date.” He and Bryce Kaufman suggest going to see _The World is Not Enough_ at the Mall of New Hampshire. They discuss it at length. Bryce is pushing for the Pokemon movie, and Jonah is sorely tempted, but like — it’s James Bond. Be an _adult_ , Bryce.

But anyway, they ask Laura Owens and Cathy Edison to see The World is Not Enough with them on Black Friday, and somehow, they say yes. Jonah puts on some of Brian’s cologne and his mom drives him all the way to Manchester despite the holiday traffic, and when she drops him off outside the theater, he sees Laura waiting alone, wrapped in a big powder blue ski jacket that makes her hair look even darker.

The movie is awesome. He’s never seen a Bond movie before, but Pierce Brosnan is — Brian always makes fun of his mom by going ‘Oh, Pierce Brosnan, save me!’ in a high-pitched voice she’d never use, but Pierce Brosnan is _the man_ . He’s literally the definition of tall, dark, and handsome. Jonah studies his face, his movements intently, barely paying attention to the plot. He tries to ignore the stirring in certain parts of his body and chalks it up to his hand brushing against Laura’s in the popcorn box. He’s _transfixed_.

After the movie they end up in a dark arcade near the end of the mall. Bryce buys them four slices of pizza. He and Laura are playing some sort of shooting game, and as Jonah drops the big orange pistol back in the holder, he grins from one corner of his mouth and says, in his best British accent, “So how ‘bout it, then?”

“Oh my God, your accent is terrible,” Laura snorts. “You sound ret—”

“Yeah, okay, whatever,” Jonah says quickly, defensively. “Like yours is any better.”

“Actually, I’m fairly sure it is,” she shoots back in what sounds like a perfectly posh English accent. “I've been practicing for years, Mr. Ryan.”

She’s smirking at him in that way that drives him insane and she’s looking at his mouth, and suddenly the next step becomes obviously, palm-sweatingly, heart-quickeningly clear, and he bends down and presses a quick kiss to her lips.

There’s an instant after he pulls back where neither of them moves, and then it all seems to happen at once. She pulls back, recoils like she’s been shocked with a cattle prod, a look of disgust on her face. Without saying a word, she storms away, and he can see her pulling Catherine away from Bryce across the arcade. Jonah’s stomach hurts, his vision blurs a little and he grabs the side of the claw machine to steady himself because it feels like his legs are about to give out. His digital watch beeps 9:00, and he walks — then runs — out of the arcade and through the mall, out into the frigid air of the parking lot where his mom is waiting at the curb.

 

It’s his turn to choose the movie rental that Saturday, and he chooses _GoldenEye_. Brian laughs — “New one must have been pretty good, huh?” — and Jonah laughs along with him but chooses to sit in the easy chair instead of on the couch, the old afghan thrown over his lap for safety’s sake. Just in case it wasn’t about Laura the night before. Just in case.

Turns out his intuition is right. It wasn’t about Laura at all.

His stomach churns with guilt as he tries to fall asleep that night. This can’t be good.

 

* * *

 

 

**sixteen**

 

Jonah gets drunk on hard liquor for the first time at his dad’s second wedding, and for the second time at a speech team party at Bryce’s house.

He, Bryce, and Paul Kruger are inseparable by eleventh grade. They achieve this sort of three-musketeers status through a series of shared taunts and humiliations and having been the only kids to take speech lessons through third grade. Paul’s easily the closest to being cool out of the three of them. He’s almost athletic and nearly as tall as Jonah, but he seems to stick out less. He’s less of a target. People don’t make fun of him as much as they mostly ignore him.

What they have in common is speech team, because they’re good at it. Bryce and Paul are easily the team’s best duo — “Star Wars in 10 Minutes” is their signature piece, and they’re going to take it all the way to nationals this year if their tournament rankings so far are any indication. Jonah’s doing all right too, kicking ass in HI. They’re Mr. Wallace’s favorites. He can tell that much.

He's pretty sure he likes guys. It’s not something he broadcasts or something he’s proud of, because as if he’s not already unpopular enough, let’s add “homo at an all-boys school” on top of that. And he’s not even supposed to be here, but, well, he didn’t get into Exeter so he’s stuck here at Derryfield, where nobody really likes him except for the small group of people who know him from forensics. Or, well, more specifically from speech, because the debate kids are their own thing and they never even really see each other because they have a whole different coach and the only time their paths really cross is on the bus to tournaments. Brady does Lincoln-Douglas and he’s good at it, because of course he is, but he’s not as good at it as Jonah is at HI. Which is good. Because Jonah doesn’t have a lot else that he’s good at.

Except, you know, liking guys. Because he’s got that in spades.

And it’s fucking terrifying on the best days, because what if people found out? What if, by some twist of fate or Freudian slip, everybody suddenly knew that he swings that way? It’s not like Spence and Brady don’t go after him enough in the locker room as it is, but at least _that’s_ never given him a hard-on (in the moment, at least). He just can’t imagine what he would do if it got out. So he doesn’t tell anybody. He’ll take this one to his grave.

Except he’s sitting in Mr. Wallace’s fifth-period history class and he’s not paying attention, because Jason Pendleton is sitting two rows away and two seats up and he’s not paying attention either, leaning back in his chair with his school tie askew and his hair sticking up in the back. Jonah’s trying very hard to make it look as if he’s looking at the board, but really, he’s looking at Jason and thinking about what it would be like to blow him. Everything about Jason looks so all-American and cool, like something straight out of the Abercrombie and Fitch quarterlies Jonah keeps hidden next to the Playboys in his room. He’s imagining the sounds Jason would make, how he’d run his hands through Jonah’s hair and kiss him when he finished, how totally awesome and accomplished it’d make him feel.

“—Jonah?”

He blinks as Mr. Wallace folds his arms expectantly. “Um. Sorry, man, I zoned out, I... yeah. What was the question?”

The rest of the class snickers as Mr. Wallace repeats the question, something about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Jonah sighs and racks his brain and stares down at his messy notes for a sign, any kind of sign.

 

Bryce throws a speech team party on the first night of winter break and everybody comes. And the upside is that Bryce only lives about three-quarters of a mile from Jonah, so even though it’s snowing and freezing cold, he doesn’t have to drive home if he’s too drunk. He can walk home. Which means he can drink as much as he wants. So that’s cool.

The other cool thing, that he carefully opts not to tell his mom, is that Bryce’s parents are in California, but his older brother has agreed to chaperone. His older brother is a senior at MIT and by ‘chaperone’ he mostly means ‘buy alcohol.’ So there’s not just a keg, but also a couple bottles of vodka and rum, and Nick Vakalis’s sister is rumored to be bringing jello shots along with all her friends from their sister school’s speech team as well.

Jonah gets there early. Bryce throws open the door and Paul is already there, grinning and bouncing in excitement and anticipation. “This is gonna be so bitchin’,” Paul says as Jonah shakes the light dusting of snow off his jacket and hangs it in the front hall closet. “You heard Vanessa’s bringing jello shots, right?”

“Vanessa’s bringing _girls_ ,” Bryce adds. “Single-sex education _sucks_. I miss girls.”

“Yeah, well,” Jonah says as they head toward the kitchen, “I’m fucking pumped. Are the debate kids still invited?”

“Fuck no,” Bryce laughs. “You think I want those guys in my house? They’re the worst.”

“Yeah,” Jonah echoes. “The worst.”

 

The party’s slow going until about fifteen after eight, when the doorbell rings and Bryce opens the door to a pack of about six girls from Chesterwood School, Vanessa Vakalis at the front of the pack. “Hey, Bryce,” she says warmly, pushing her way through the door and pulling off her white knit beanie. “Hey guys.”

“Ugh, get out, Vanessa,” shouts her twin brother from where he’s sprawled on the couch, and she flips him off as she removes her own coat. Nick Vakalis is a senior, olive-skinned with dark hair and a Greek flag bumper sticker on the back of his car, and Jonah has never paid much attention to him outside of the team. But from where he’s lying on Bryce’s couch, a bottle of beer held loosely in one hand as he chats with Gabe Gordon, he’s almost — definitely — kind of cute.

Jonah blinks and takes a deep breath, a warning to himself. Don’t think about that. Don’t do that. He takes the jello shot Vanessa offers him and slams it back, then takes another.

Four jello shots, a shot of fireball, and a beer later, and he’s well and truly fucked up.

There’s Christmas music playing for some reason, which is weird because they definitely weren’t listening to Christmas music an hour ago, and the room feels like it’s spinning around him. Bryce’s house has a glassed-in sunporch on the other side of the house, so he excuses himself from the room and makes his way there, stopping only once to steady himself on the mantle of the fireplace.

The sunporch is freezing and dark, but as he moves to turn on the light, he hears a voice. “Jonah?”

He blinks. “Yeah?”

“It’s me. Uh. Nick.” Jonah’s eyes adjust to the dark and as they do, he sees Nick Vakalis materialize before him, sitting on the floor of the sunporch with his arms folded.

“Are you okay?” Jonah asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say, and Nick laughs.

“I’m fine. Are you okay?”

“… yeah?” Jonah says. “I’m really drunk. I had four jello shots—”

“Jesus.”

“—and a shot of Fireball and a beer. Actually maybe two beers.”

“Thank God you’re tall,” Nick says. “Four? Those things get you fucked up really slow, too. It’s like eating a whole weed brownie. You’re not supposed to do that. Sit down.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Jonah carefully lowers himself to the floor beside Nick. “Are you cold? It’s like, really fucking cold in here.”

“I’m kind of cold, yeah.” Nick shrugs. “I don’t really want to go get my jacket though. My sister—”

“She’s still here, she didn’t leave.”

“Yeah, whatever.” He pauses, then adds, “Vanessa just kind of… takes over a room. Whatever. It’s stupid.”

“You guys don’t get along?”

“We get along okay. I could just do without her being around sometimes.” Nick exhales, and Jonah can see his breath in the chill of the room as his eyes adjust further. “It’s kind of stupid. It’s hard to explain.”

“Yeah, Jonah says, unsure what to say. “I’m an only child, so…”

“Lucky you,” Nick laughs darkly. “It’s just… it’s weird.”

“Yeah.” Jonah feels Nick’s knee bump against his where they’re sitting on the floor, and he pauses. “She brought girls. It’s crazy how that’s such a big deal at an all-boys school.”

Nick snorts. “I mean, I guess, if that’s your thing.”

Jonah feels his stomach jolt and twist, the tips of his fingers grow cold and kind of tingle in a way that isn’t related to the temperature in the room at all. “Is it… not yours, or whatever?”

In the darkness, he sees Nick lift one shoulder in a half-committed shrug. “Are you gonna, like, call me a fag and tell everybody I tried to kiss you if I say that it’s not?”

“What?” Jonah blinks, because what? “No, dude, I’m not — fuck. I mean. No. I wouldn’t.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Nick pauses and then adds, “It’s weird. Saying that out loud or whatever. I’m trying to get used to it before college.”

“Yeah. Where do you want to go?” He’s letting the alcohol make conversation for him now, because all he can focus on is that he’s sitting in the dark, in the cold, with his cute teammate who just admitted to liking guys too, only he doesn’t know about the _too_ part, and Jonah doesn’t know how to say it out loud without making it weird and throwing off the rhythm of the conversation.

“Probably Northwestern or Wesleyan. Maybe Swarthmore as a safety.” Nick takes a swig from the bottle Jonah hadn’t noticed beside him on the floor. “Have you started thinking yet—”

“Dartmouth,” Jonah says immediately, too quickly. “Just Dartmouth.”

“Any safeties?”

“I mean, I’ll apply, but I’m not gonna need ‘em,” Jonah says, throwing his head and shoulders back. “Dartmouth fuckin’ loves legacies.”

“Right,” Nick says slowly. “I mean, yeah. That makes sense.”

“Yeah,” Jonah says again, for lack of anything else to say. Nick’s knee bumps against his again in the dark, and they both pull away quickly. “Sorry.”

“Sorry.” Nick mutters it as quickly as he does.

There’s another long pause, and another thought floats to the top of Jonah’s mind, and he’s just drunk enough to think it’s not a terrible idea. “Truth or dare,” he says quickly, and Nick’s knee bumps his again, this time ostensibly out of surprise.

“Huh?”

“Truth or dare,” Jonah enunciates slowly. “C’mon. Party games. Unless you wanna go in there and play whatever lame-ass improv game everybody’s doing—”

“Fine,” Nick says slowly. “Truth.”

Jonah furrows his brow, trying to figure out the right phrasing for what he’s about to ask. “When did you, uh… know? That you liked guys?”

“Wait, seriously? That’s what this is about?”

“Dude, just answer the question, you can ask me whatever you want.”

Nick laughs, his eyes gleaming in the low light. “Okay. Fine. I’ll bite. Middle school, I guess. When did you?”

A wave of nausea hits Jonah, one that he’s certain has nothing to do with the alcohol in his system. “I didn't — I’m not—”

“You’re not subtle, Jonah,” says Nick. “So when was it?”

Jonah swallows through the nausea. “Uh, middle school, I guess,” he mutters. “Okay. Truth or dare.”

“Wait, it’s not my turn again,” Nick says quickly. “That wasn’t a truth, you just answered a question. Were you seriously that desperate to get it out?”

“Fuck off, Vakalis—"

“I’m not making fun of you.” Nick sighs. “Jesus. I’m just wondering. You seemed like you couldn’t wait to bring it up. You’ve got me in a dark room, we’re talking about this stuff—”

“Why are we talking about this?” Jonah asks, irritated. “Who even brought this up?”

“I don’t even fucking remember.” There’s a long pause, as Jonah’s heartbeat quickens, the silence screamingly heavy in the dark, and then Nick adds, “Truth or dare?”

“I, uh.” Jonah doesn’t know what to do, so he says what he always says in these situations. “Dare.”

There’s a long pause, and he can see Nick looking at him in the dark, his face solemn and serious. It’s cold and they’ve got their backs against the wicker couch, and Nick turns to face him more fully, sliding his whole body at a right angle to Jonah’s. Jonah can tell where this is going already, he’s sixteen, not eleven, but nowhere in him does it occur to simply move away. Something kicks inside him, something he normally tries to swallow, bite down, ignore and conceal, and then Nick’s leaning a little closer to him and he’s got his cold hands on top of Jonah’s and their faces are close together, too close, and —

This. This is the other thing he’s been missing, it’s as good as any girl he’s ever kissed. Not _better,_ but just as good, and it’s the confirmation he’s been avoiding and anticipating in equal amounts for years. Since seventh grade and Sebastien Baudelaire, at least. Nick’s kissing him softly and it occurs to Jonah that this is the first time that he’s ever been the one to just _be kissed_. The tip of his nose is numb from cold or booze or both and Nick’s hands tighten on his wrists before Jonah uses that grip to pull Nick closer, and before he knows what’s happening they’re both sprawled on the chilly floor, Nick on top of him, and he’s shocked by how quickly it’s happening but he can’t complain in the least.

 

He leaves the sunporch half an hour later, his fingers almost numb from the cold. He’s pretty sure his hair is fucked up and he’s shocked that nobody walked in on them at all but once they got started the momentum was too much to stop, and Nick was — he can do this, he wants to do it again. 

As he steps out into the rest of the house he comes face to face with Paul. “Dude,” Paul mutters, “where were you?”

“Oh, Nick and I were just fucking around in the sunroom,” Jonah says quickly, the sexual connotation of the phrasing occurring to him a second too late. “I mean, you know, talking about college and stuff. I was really drunk, needed to cool off.”

“Yeah, okay,” Paul says. “Um, you should probably go. The cops came by—”

“Seriously? Fuck.”

“Noise complaint.” Paul shakes his head. “And it’s snowing like, really hard, so people are gonna have to stay here. Bryce is…”

“Pissed.”

“Yeah.”

Jonah exhales, tugs at his bangs. “Okay. I’m gonna go. What time is it?”

“Like midnight —”

“Fuck. I can’t drive in this. I can’t _drive_ right now.” He doesn’t know why he’s saying this out loud, but as he looks over his shoulder, he spots Nick walking the other direction. “Nick! It’s like, blizzarding, you want to get a ride or what?”

Nick frowns as he turns. “I live all the way in Manchester and you’re still — you’re not good to drive.”

“Okay.” Jonah frowns back. “I mean, we could work something out, but—”

“I’m just gonna get a ride with my sister, okay?” he says. “She has snow tires. I’ll see you after break, Jonah.”

“Yeah.” Jonah feels the wave of nausea hit him again, harder and more real this time. He turns back to Paul. “I’m not walking home. I’m gonna stay here. Sleep on the couch.”

“Yeah, me too.” Paul shakes his head. “This is fucked up.”

“Fucked up,” mutters Jonah in agreement, but his mind is on Nick’s cold shoulder.

 

It’s nearly the end of the spring semester of their junior year, and Bryce, Paul, and Jonah aren’t friends anymore.

He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t fucking get it. One day they’re friends and the next day Bryce is giving him the same nasty looks as everyone else, and Paul’s snickering at him behind his back, and Jonah’s walking to his locker one day when he hears Brady laughing at him as usual but then his friends’ laughter is in the mix too.

He gives it a week, because maybe it’s a practical joke. Maybe they’re just fucking with him. He holds his head up high and squares his shoulders and walks like he has somewhere important to be. He’s not someone they can just fuck with like this. But nope. It doesn’t end. And by the end of the second week, Jonah’s had enough, and he’s on his way to his car when he spots Paul and Bryce walking in front of him and is suddenly angry.

Angry at Paul for abandoning him. For throwing him to the wolves. Angry at both of them for forgetting everything they’d been through together. He’s got adrenaline and rage coursing through all 6’4” of him, and suddenly he’s running at them both, throwing himself at Paul in anger and pushing him down to the asphalt in the junior-senior parking lot.

“What the fuck?!” He hears Bryce yelling and feels him land on top of him, but Bryce is still a fucking pygmy, 5’5” on a good day, and he shakes him off and elbows him hard. Paul’s stronger than Jonah, and after a moment of grappling grabs him by the arm and pulls hard. Jonah’s shoulder hits the ground and someone’s hitting him in the ribs and he curls to cover his stomach, and there’s a tinny sort of shouting before Bryce and Paul are both being pulled away by an apoplectic Coach Jensen.

Paul’s face looks like hell, bleeding and scraped up hard where he hit the rough asphalt and gravel of the parking lot, and Jonah staggers to his feet as another teacher grabs him by the arm.

“Fuck you, Paul,” is all he can say as they’re pulled in separate directions. “Fuck you, Bryce. Fuck you both.”

 

* * *

 

**seventeen**

 

He’s grounded through the first half of the summer due to the fight. He gets a job at the ice cream place in downtown Nashua just to break up the monotony of it, but quits as soon as he’s no longer grounded. Not before he makes friends with Cathy Edison, though.

Cathy works at the ice cream place during the summers. “My parents want me to demonstrate a work ethic before they hire me after college,” she says as she rinses a scoop. “I mean, it’s boring, but whatever. If I want to be on the board of a Fortune 500 company by the time I’m 30, I’ll take it.”

“That’s badass,” Jonah says. “I respect that.”

Cathy’s also the volleyball captain at Chesterwood and stands 6’1” at seventeen years old, which puts her very close to Jonah’s own eye level. The day he quits, he tosses her his number on a folded piece of paper from the receipt tape. “If you want to hang out, give me a call,” he says.

She shrugs. “Totally.”

So it’s almost the end of the summer and they’ve been hanging out a lot, just driving when they don’t have anywhere else to be. Jonah pulls into the liquor stores off the highway and buys them beer and occasionally a bottle of scotch, doesn’t get carded because he’s 6’4” and his height finally has its perks. Cathy’s little brother is the de facto weed dealer at Derryfield-Chesterwood and apparently that’s the silver lining to this particular cloud, that’s how they spend the summer, various shades of fucked up and occasionally lazily making out in his car or in his bed when his stepdad's not home and his mom's too pilled out to notice him bringing Cathy up to his room.

It’s a Tuesday night before the start of senior year. It’s a Tuesday, and Cathy’s in the passenger seat of Jonah’s Volvo and they’re driving down I-95 way too fast. He can feel her ponytail whip against his temple in the breeze between both the rolled-down windows, and he’s feeling alive. He’s a little buzzed and she’s got a bottle of water resting between both of her bare thighs in cutoffs and her legs are so long, long enough to rival his. And it’s like — he’d be okay if this is how the whole year was going to be, if this was how it was gonna go, just like this hot August night. But nothing ever stays like this. _Nothing gold can stay._ The fuckin’ Outsiders. He should reread that.

“You okay?” Cathy says, turning down the radio and projecting over the grind of the car against the highway. And Jonah shrugs.

“Totally,” he lies.

 

He loses his virginity four weeks after school starts, when his mom’s out of town at a conference and Mark’s out late doing god knows what. Better late than never. It lasts about thirty seconds and he forgets how to put on a condom at first and Cathy looks terrified when he yanks off his boxers for the first time, and he’s not even certain that he gets it all the way inside her before it’s almost too late, but it’s over, it’s done, he’s done it, he’s had sex. And he’s ready to go again about twenty minutes later but Cathy’s already got her volleyball team hoodie and her jeans back on and she’s hustling into the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice.

“So, uh,” he says when she’s back in his bedroom, sitting crosslegged on his bed while he yanks on his clothes. “You want to, uh, do it again?”

She frowns. “Maybe later.”

“Okay.” Jonah doesn’t say what he wants to say, which is something about how he didn’t get to go down on her and from everything he’s heard he’s really curious about that. Because that’s probably fucking weird, most guys don’t give a shit about oral, he doesn’t want to freak her out like that. “Cool. So, uh, do you have a lot of homework yet, or what?”

“Yeah, I should probably head home, actually,” Cathy says quickly, as if she’s grateful for him giving her the out. “So much for AP Brit Lit. It’s like, give us a break, we all have other classes—”

He walks her out, kisses her on the front stoop but notices as she tenses, and all of a sudden he can feel it happening again, the pulling away. The same thing that happened with Nick last winter. And he tenses up as well, and doesn’t bother to wave goodbye as she pulls out of the driveway, just lets the front door slam behind him as he walks back into the empty house.

Mark’s drunk when he comes home that night. As expected. Jonah gives him a wide berth as usual, stays in his room, throws on a DVD of _GoldenEye_ and jerks off to one of the magazines he keeps under his mattress. Pierce Brosnan is still so fucking hot.

 

He joins the ski team because he’s so tired of the mandatory sport rule, and it’s the only one that doesn’t seem like it’ll interfere significantly with forensics. Brady does both, ski and forensics _and_ lax in the spring, so if he can make it work, Jonah totally can. Brady’s kind of a fucking idiot, the more he thinks about it. He’s not that smart. Like, Jonah’s not that smart either, but Brady’s just a big dumb dick, born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. He steals other people’s arguments and pretends they’re his own. If anyone in his crew is particularly smart, it’s Spence, but Spence is also a little bit of a sociopath, even more so than Brady — Brady likes fucking with people, grabbing dicks in the locker room and accusing the dick-haver of being gay for it, but Spence humiliates them, gets under their skin until they can’t stand to look anyone else in the eye.

And there’s Jason, who doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing with those guys but hangs around with them anyway. Jonah ignores him pointedly, because there’s no use dwelling on it. Jason’s gotten super hot these last couple years, his shoulders broadening and his hair growing out a little bit shaggy to offset his square jaw and all-American preppy good looks, and Jonah grinds his teeth and pretends not to notice when he walks by him in the showers.

He’s only done anything with Nick and another guy, this dude Peter who he roomed with at the Yale tournament, and that was weird and tentative and good and he walked away from it knowing that this is, in some inextricable way, part of who he is. Jonah Ryan, 17, nationally ranked in humorous interpretation, medicated for ADHD, barely holding a 4.0 together with the help of three tutors, goes both ways. He’s not exactly leading a pride parade down the hall at Derryfield, but he feels like this is something that, given time, maybe he could be okay with. Not like he’s exactly telling anyone. Not like Bryce and Paul are still there to serve as a sounding board. But whatever. He’s a senior. He has six more months left in this place. He can keep it on the DL for six more months.

Anyway, he joins the ski team because it feels like an easy sport for a year that’s supposed to be easy enough in itself, and to be fair, it is. His mom yells at him about his college essays every night, yells at him about his SAT scores and he takes again and again until they’re satisfactory. The letters of recommendation come in and he sends off all the applications, four Ivies and three liberal arts safeties just in case, and then he waits.

 

It’s January. Ski season. They’re on a trip to Mount Butternut and it’s the same shit as usual, Jonah doesn’t know why he chose this sport. It’s just the lax team with a couple outliers, and he’s doing okay, he’s a pretty fucking good skier when it comes to the downhill races but it doesn’t seem to make a difference to any of the guys who hate him. Like Brady. Like Spence.

It’s like a whole twelve and a half years of brewing resentment have all come to a boil these past few months, and Jonah has no idea what he even did wrong to begin with. He considers asking at the worst of times, but can just hear Brady tossing the words back at him in that whiny, mocking tone of voice, and he knows it’d be useless. No good. He keeps his head up. He keeps his shoulders back. Straightens his posture and keeps trying.

He misses sitting with Bryce and Paul during speech practices. If Mr. Wallace noticed their threesome fracturing into two and one, he hasn’t said anything, but offers Jonah extra advice and critique anyway, writes one of his letters of recommendation and promises he’s said only good things.

He misses Cathy, who hasn’t been returning his calls lately. He could use a date to the winter formal. He doesn’t want to have to ask some random Chesterwood girl, would rather go with someone he knows.

It’s January and he’s sitting in the hotel room after a day of competing with half the ski team. They’re drinking — Brady’s brother Ty apparently hooked him up with a case of beer before he left — and laughing and having a blast, and Jonah notices that maybe everyone’s being a little too friendly to him, but he doesn’t question it. Maybe they’re just fucking being nice. Maybe he’s actually made a good enough impression today, with a third-place medal still slung around his neck.

Brady’s smirking as he cracks open another beer. “Hey, Jonah,” he says casually. “What would you do for $500?”

“And a Klondike bar?” Jonah jokes awkwardly, but nobody laughs. “I, uh. I dunno, man. Why?”

Brady looks around the room. “Would you let Spence put his balls on your face?”

Jonah blinks, taken aback. “Uh, you’re gonna have to pay me a lot more than that to let Haberman teabag me,” he says, forcing his voice to stay lighthearted, stay upbeat. It’s just joking around, just guy stuff. Not that big of a deal.

Spence smirks at Brady, then fixes his ice-chip-grey eyes on Jonah’s. “Would you blow Jason?” he asks, all low and slimy, and Jonah pauses a beat too long before he answers, his eyes flicking over to Jason, who looks strange and pale.

“I mean, for $500? Shit,” he says. “I could use a new set of speakers.”

Brady and Spence exchange a look. “Do it,” Brady commands, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket. “I fuckin’ bet you won’t go through with it.”

“Uh, fuck you, Brady,” Jonah says as he scrambles to his feet. “Joke’s on you, because you don’t know what I will or won’t do—”

“Guys, come on,” Jason says awkwardly. “Be cool.”

Brady rounds on Jason, the same sneer still playing on his face. “What, are you too much of a fucking pussy now?” he goads him. “A mouth’s a mouth, Jason, it’s not like you haven’t gotten them before—”

Jonah’s fired up now, all edge and adrenaline like he’s ready for a fight. He reaches out and grabs the back of Jason’s sweatshirt, yanks him backward. “Let’s fucking go,” he says, pulling him in the direction of the bathroom, but Brady and Spence are both shaking their heads.

“Uh-uh,” Brady says with an evil little sneer. “Right here. Or not at all.”

Jonah narrows his eyes as he sizes them both up, waiting for the scene to break, for the snickering to start. But they don’t back down, and it’s clear within an instant that he can’t, either.

He glances at Jason, who swallows audibly, and gives him a tight nod.

Then he drops to his knees.

 

There’s a calendar on his wall counting down the days until graduation.

Counting down the days until he can walk down the hall without hearing a single “BJ Ryan” or having someone knock his books or pencil to the ground to see him on his knees.

Counting down the days until he can walk the stage at the Manchester Civic Center and never see any of these fuckheads again.

So he drinks. He drinks a lot. When he doesn’t have homework, he drinks. He drives to out-of-town parties with people he met once or twice at tournaments to have an excuse to get wasted, to look people in the eye and not feel them laughing at him. The rest of the time, he stays in his room, slouched in front of his computer, arguing on message boards and playing video games and smoking weed he bought off Charlie Edison. He gets really into German metal, waits until his mom and Mark have gone to bed and puts on Rammstein and thrashes around his room with his headphones on. And at the end of every day he marks off another day on the calendar in black Sharpie and hopes the next day will go a little bit faster.

By the time April rolls around, he’s having a hard time even dragging himself out of bed at all. He fakes sick four times over the course of the month just to be able to sleep. He checks the mail in trepidation every day, waiting for another thin letter with a university return address in the upper corner.

It’s the middle of April and he’s home “sick” with the “flu” for the third time when he hears the mail slide through the slot in the door, and reluctantly drags himself out of his desk chair and trudges into the living room. The mail’s in a pile on beneath the front door, and he bends down to grab it: a magazine for Mark, a couple bills addressed to his mom, junk mail and — a packet. Thick. Heavy. Addressed to a Mr. Jonah Ryan.

His eyes immediately dart up to the return address. Dartmouth College.

He feels a smile begin to spread across his face almost before he realizes what it means. Stares at the return address for another moment before he rips open the envelope, pulls out a letter:

_Dear Mr. Ryan, we are pleased to inform you of your acceptance to Dartmouth College’s Class of 2008…_

He marks off the day in the middle of the afternoon and leaves the letter on the kitchen counter for his mom and Mark to find as soon as they get home. Then he puts on clothes and goes for a drive, brings the last of his weed along with him and gets stoned in the woods outside of town.

Fuck it. He deserves this.

 

He walks into school that Friday wearing the Dartmouth shirt his mom bought him during their college tour that summer. Seniors are allowed to wear shirts from colleges that have accepted them on Fridays, that’s the policy, and by midmorning word has apparently gotten around, because Mr. Wallace congratulates him as soon as he walks into his classroom at lunch — because he’s gotten over the stigma of eating lunch with a teacher, fuck it, it’s better than eating alone on the loading docks behind the auditorium.

“You know, Jonah,” says Mr. Wallace as he puts down his sandwich, “college isn’t necessarily a solution to all your problems.”

Jonah swallows his mouthful of chicken salad. “What do you mean?” he asks, and Mr. Wallace sighs, rubbing a hand over his bearded jawline. God, he’s handsome. He’s always been handsome. Kind of dorky, but way better looking than a history teacher in the New Hampshire suburbs should be.

“I mean, I don’t claim to know what your problems are,” Mr. Wallace says carefully. “But you should just… be careful. Don’t expect everything to be better just because your surroundings have changed. I’ve made that mistake before myself.”

“Whatever,” Jonah says. “I don’t have problems. I’m doing awesome. I kick ass wherever I go. Never been a challenge Jonah Ryan couldn't handle.”

Mr. Wallace’s eyebrows go up behind his glasses, but he says nothing, just picks up his sandwich again and takes a bite.

“Thanks, by the way,” Jonah adds sheepishly. “For, you know. All this. The letter and, uh, everything.”

“I think you’re an interesting kid,” says Mr. Wallace. “For better or worse, you’ll do interesting things. I want to be able to say I encouraged you when I had the chance.”

 

* * *

 

**eighteen**

 

If college isn’t exactly what he thought it would be, Jonah can’t say he’s surprised.

He pledges a frat. He pledges a frat because it’s Dartmouth and it’s what you do, and he gets in because there’s nothing he won’t do. He drinks until he pukes most nights of the week and he gives more blowjobs than he gets, many more, but who’s counting? He’s there and he’s got friends, or at least, he’s got people who talk to him and party with him, and yeah, maybe his pledge name is Deep Throat but there were worse ones even within his own pledge class, and he didn’t have to eat anyone’s vomit so he figures he got off easy.

He pledges a frat and he makes friends, sort of, and everything’s going more or less how he expected. He’s torn between political science and finance as a major. Finance is where the money is but everyone in his family expects him to go poli-sci, except for his dad, apparently, who actually responds to the email he sends him with one sentence: “I recommend the School of Business if you think you have the temperament to excel in finance.”

Which, whatever, fuck you too, Dad. He can practically hear it in his head, that over-the-top genteel southern drawl that he hasn’t even heard since he was 15 and wasted and making terrible choices at that fucking wedding. Roderick — not even his dad, he’s really just Roderick to Jonah now — has two more kids now. Not like Jonah’s paying attention or anything, just hears it through the grapevine.

But when Alumni Day rolls around, he checks his college email and sees that the School of Business is holding a panel featuring Roderick Ryan ’85, senior commodities trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, as well as a few other no-name alums, Jonah swallows around the hangover and sends a last-minute email to RSVP. He shows up sweaty and knowing he reeks of booze in his Delta Kappa Phi sweatshirt and soccer slides, pushing his hair out of his eyes as he sinks into a seat near the back of the auditorium.

His dad — Roderick — whatever the fuck he’s supposed to call him now — is introduced second, to tepid applause. He takes a seat and every time he speaks up during the panel, Jonah has to grind his teeth.

When he was ten, he spent all day waiting outside for Roderick to show up, to pick him up so they could go to a showing of _Batman Forever._ He didn’t even go in for lunch, afraid he’d miss his dad’s car rolling by, so his mom made him a PB &J and brought it out so that he could eat it in the front yard. He waited. And he waited. And by the time the sun was going down it was nine o’clock and the last showing at the Mall of New Hampshire had already started.

“J.J., honey,” his mom had said as he stomped past her on his way up to his room. “You know this wasn’t your fault. Your father is —”

She’d stopped herself, whatever she was about to say. And Jonah had ignored her at the time, but he can fill in the blanks. Selfish. Shitty. A fucking deadbeat who managed to confuse a trust fund with actual time spent parenting. Whatever. Doesn’t matter.

He sits through the panel and when it comes time for audience questions, he slouches down to the mic in front, ending up third in line.

“Uh, I have a question for Roderick,” he says when he makes it to the front of the line. His father’s head snaps in his direction, eyes narrowing, brow furrowing. He sees the look of recognition flash across his face, and he grins with the weight of possibility.

Because he could say anything. He could humiliate his father in front of his peers and what feels like half the School of Business. _I have a question for Roderick: why did you knock up my mom and decide you didn’t want to be a dad after about four years? Why did you bounce in and out of my life at will, like being a parent was just some kind of hobby you could pick up or set down as you wanted? Why the fuck didn’t you take me to see Batman Forever? Would it have really been that hard to just be there?_

He pauses for a little longer than necessary, then takes a deep breath. “In your time at the School of Business, did you find that the coursework prepared you for the realities of the finance industry, or were you surprised by the learning curve after you graduated?”

 

He takes a shower back at the frat house that afternoon, then heads to the Department of Political Science to file his paperwork for a major.

He goes to a party that night, avoids his pledgemaster's creepy blue eyes as he ducks into another room with a solo cup of rum and coke in one hand. He bumps into a guy he only kind of knows, not by name but only by his pledge name, which was Cockroach. Cockroach offers him a fist pound. “Deep Throat, my man,” he grins, and Jonah raises his cup in assent. “You got weed?”

“Always,” Jonah says. “What’ve you got?”

Cockroach shrugs. “Little bit of blow. Pretty sure we can work out a trade—”

Jonah furrows his brow. He thinks it over, though being three shots deep already, not too hard. “Yeah, cool,” he says. “Let’s go.”

 

It turns out the thing about how drinking makes you feel less is totally true.

Turns out the thing about how coke makes you feel like the best possible version of yourself? Also totally true.

He throws his shoulders back. He shouts his own name. Not J.J., not B.J., not Deep Throat. Jonah Ryan. J-Rock O’Clock. J-Diddy, ladies get giddy. He shouts it loud enough that other people will remember. Shouts it loud enough to hear himself. He _is_ his own hype man. He _is_ his own hype. He pushes himself further, goes harder, wants to know what his own limits are just so he can obliterate them.

Because here’s the thing: He didn’t get here because he’s a fucking loser. He can’t let himself think that anymore. He’s let himself think that way too long. He spent all of middle school, all of high school letting other people convince him he was worthless, internalizing the messages they sent him. And fuck that. What he needs is bravado. What he needs his to square his shoulders, stand up straight, set his jaw and hit them before they can throw the first punch.

Bullshit and bluster and bravado and bravery. Nobody’s going to fucking stop him from here on out. He made it through eighteen years. His dad can fuck off, Brady Lucas can fuck off, Bryce and Paul and Nick Vakalis and anyone else who’s made it their business to get in his way can fuck off, and blow _him_ for a change, while they’re at it.

 

Turns out coke hangovers are even worse than the regular kind.

He'll get used to it.

 


End file.
